What Should We Do About Security Ethics?

An anonymous reader writes "I am a senior security xxx in a Fortune 300 company and I am very frustrated at what I see. I see our customers turn a blind eye to blatant security issues, in the name of the application or business requirements. I see our own senior officers reduce the risk ratings of internal findings, and even strong-arm 3rd party auditors/testers to reduce their risk ratings on the threat of losing our business. It's truly sad that the fear of losing our jobs and the necessity of supporting our families comes first before the security of highly confidential information. All so executives can look good and make their bonuses? How should people start blowing the whistle on companies like this?"

What Should We Do About Security Ethics?

[doti (966971)]

Ignore it?

There are very few ethical companies.

[EmbeddedJanitor (597831)]

Most are only limited by what the law allows. Although a company might speak of ethics, don't expect them to actually practice it.

And why bother about security ethics when there are much more important ethical considerations like how they treat staff? Again, most companies screw most of their staff to the limit of the law.

In short: If you're looking for ethics you got off on the wrong planet.

Re:There are very few ethical companies.

[by Anonymous Coward]

Don't even get me started. I work at a company which makes document imaging software and our customers send us all kinds of crap that honestly, scares the shit out of me. Not to mention information specifically protected by law. Most of the time, I get the sense that the sender didn't even remotely think about it. All they know is "this is not viewing/printing how it should" and so off they send it, as an attachment on unencrypted email.

So now I am put in the position of -- do I actually work on the client's problem? Or do I immediately destroy the information and tell them they are a dumbass? You know what the reality is? The highly sensitive document gets printed out, sometimes hundreds of times (as I tweak things during the debugging process), and I try to shred everything but when there's hundreds of copies, I'm sure I've missed one. If I was unscrupulous I could have made several million dollars off the information I see on a daily basis and I'm not exaggerating. Millions. Honestly it pisses me off.

Re:There are very few ethical companies.

[by Anonymous Coward]

I remember in my days consulting, I got sent a DB to look at. This DB held all the personal information for everyone who was worth over $X. The DB contained SSN's, spouse's name, spouse's SSN, etc. As soon as I saw this DB, I asked where the NDA for it was. When I was told there was no NDA sent over, I felt sorry for everyone who's information was in there.

Here's an interesting thought:

[by Anonymous Coward]

As an IT auditor doing internal control audits, this thought occurs to me:

When my company audits you and attests to the controls being in place and operating effectively, they essentially take legal responsibility for your internal controls. If we get strong-armed or bought off and decided to cover it up (which has never happened in my experience), we are on the legal hook for the results. We can be sued. The CPA that signs off on the audit can lose his license and get in all kinds of other trouble.

If one wanted to keep one's job, but wanted to whistleblow on this situation, one might be prudent to blow the whistle on the auditors (to the AICPA) for materially misstating the operating effectiveness of your company's controls. The auditors take the fall, and your company gets a pass by saying "Hey, we didn't know, they signed off on it!", and subsequently tightening up controls to ensure that no eyebrows are raised in the future.

Food for thought.

Three Words:

[canUbeleiveIT (787307)]

Cover your ass.

Re:Three Words:

[NeverVotedBush (1041088)]

Actually this is probably better advice than most realize. I don't know if it was tongue in cheek or not, but it is damned good advice.

Where I work, security is a really big issue and I have to deal with people all the time that don't realize that security is something they should consider with every decision they make during the day. Needless to say, many don't feel the same way. They are about to get raked over the coals by management.

Unfortunately for some, they are in the crosshairs for their lax stance on security. I don't know what management is going to do with them, but management knows who they are and they stand a good chance of at least repremands and loss of pay increases, and at the worst for them, pink slips.

Anyone in IT who thinks data security isn't their job is fooling themselves and setting themselves up for a new career. If you read the SANS Newsbites, you see breach after breach and people getting sacked or worse.

People need to tighten up their systems, audit their systems, run configuration management, and even penetration test their systems. If you can show you are at least trying to cover your ass, you stand a better chance of being seen as proactive and trying to protect the company even if it does get breached.

But if something happens and it comes time to pick up the pieces, and all you can say is well, we shoulda done that but we didn't, you might want to have a plan B in terms of a career because you will probably need it.

Re:Three Words:

[zappepcs (820751)]

This is about as good as I know to do. Document everything. Where I work, I politely make my senior (not plural) aware of something I see as a security risk and ask for direction after giving what I think are the two-three possible methods to cure the issue. If that direction is 'do nothing' or worse, I have at least documented it. I always do this with a follow up email, or as part of my bi-weekly report.

When I am running a tech project at work, I simply schedule resources in the project plan for security assessment and risk abatement. If these are cut from the resource budget of the project, it is documented on whose authority such was removed from the project.

Basically stated: COVER your ass, and those below you. When those internal emails get leaked onto the internets or wikileaks it will be you shown as having 'concerns' about the security practices, and others who are guilty of the massive security problems being allowed to propagate. That makes finding the next job much easier.

Additionally, all managers can find a few hours here and there within their department resources to do some security auditing and testing. Showing these results on your status reports documents proactive use of company resources. Additionally, if you can show that customer xyz just survived an attack because of something you did, you may end up being given more slack to accomplish your true and altruistic goals ( - that is sad state of affairs ) of providing secure products and services. Each time the company suffers a loss through security problems and documents the cost of recovery, you can show next time what security auditing would have saved them if they had taken actions earlier, such as the nice plan you hand them to peruse which would stop future such attacks.

Gee, I dunno

[Gewalt (1200451)]

how about you gather some evidence and publish it?

Of course, you'll lose your job over it. So decide now. Do you want to sleep at night? Or do you want to feed your family?

Re:Gee, I dunno

[plover (150551)]

Yes, gather evidence, but DO NOT publish it. Be very careful who you tell. If you do publish it they will hunt for whoever leaked it; if they find you at the end of the trail, you will be fired and likely blackballed in your city. (That's the thing about pissing off security people; they know exactly how the system works and will skirt the labor laws to put someone in a world of hurt.) It won't matter if it made their security better, or if someone gets an award for fixing it, or if your stock doubles because of your shiny new security model, if you hurt their image they'll put you down like a dog.

Check around, maybe your company already has a CISSP on staff you could talk to. If not, as a large company you likely have an Info Security officer or manager, or perhaps a Loss Prevention or Asset Management department. Or perhaps you have someone in the networking area responsible for security (firewall installers, Active Directory admins, etc.) Corner the person in charge, and start asking him pointed questions, like "Did you see the news about company Y, who got hacked by exploiting this same vulnerability we've got?" "Have you done a risk analysis?" "What would you do if X happened?" "Do we have an incident response plan?"

Or maybe you take credit cards, and have a PCI auditor running around. It's their job to care about security holes. Get your findings to them.

Just saying "OMG, we're using WEP!" or "look, someone keeps pulling these XSS attacks on us, I told you so!" isn't likely to be earth shatteringly bad news; trust me, it's pretty much just irritating to those who politely listen to you whine. But offering constructive organizational advice might let these people know that you're not stupid, and that you really could help them improve their security.

If you're considering a career change into the security field, a positive attitude towards fixing the systemic problems (big picture, not just the one set of things you're looking at) might get you somewhere.

Wikileaks

[Mondo1287 (622491)]

http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Wikileaks [wikileaks.org]

Re:Wikileaks

[couchslug (175151)]

If you leak it, not only do it on the sly in a manner that can't be traced to you (or you'll probably never be hired in a position of trust again!) but have an authentication method that can PROVE it's you in case the Feds come looking and you need to roll over.

Re:Wikileaks

[by Anonymous Coward]

I work for a very large US government department. Our agency oversees all of the child agencies. If we leak information about how we fast-talk the 20-some year old college graduate security auditors that know jack about computers, we would surely lose our contract. Our contract pays big, on the order of a few million per year. We have a total staff a little over 20, do the math. If the federal it director says to do it one way, we do it that one way to ensure nice paychecks to our employees.

Now, I am one of these employees and I'm not going to watch my job burn because the government is hiding blatent security problems. The next person that comes in will comply the same way and I'm left searching for a new job. No. What I do is purposely delay audit results. Miss a deadline here and there. Specifically mention other areas of concern while satisfying the customer by fast talking through another area. Results? It turned your governments security finding report from a B to a D. This past year sucked, work wise, but we're far more secure now than we were a year ago.

Just to scare you some more, we were sending backup tapes offsite without using encryption. We also didn't encrypt our laptops until the day before the government stipulated deadline. The best one? One of our budget management systems runs a public X server as root. Guess what else? We hold tons of medical, legal, and personal information for a very large number of you americans. Yea.

You're damn right we need to change how we address security concerns. I have no ideas on how to change this, so I will continue to be very cautious in my personal life. I will also continue to take contracts like this to ensure I can feed my family for the next couple of decades.

How my company handled it.

[awyeah (70462)]

It's more common than you think. Some of it is due to laziness, some due to a lack of knowledge, and some due to time constraints. Fortunately, for the really sensitive information, management at my company finally put into place very strict policies on how we handle the data: How we store it, erase it, encrypt it, and display it. Granted, most of these policies are actually put in place by vendors that require it, but we've taken those standards and extended them across all sensitive information.

If you're failing SOX/SAS-70/404 audits (or whatever types of audits apply to you)... that's bad, although you've already identified that.

We formed a data security team - it's just one dedicated person right now, but since he's really only involved with the policy stuff, that's enough for us - however, he does hold frequent and regular meetings with management across all departments. The DS team recently published our "best practices" which every developer now has posted at his/her desk.

Because management took this very seriously, we became one of the first companies in our industry to have all of the current versions of our software fully compliant with industry security standards.

If there are no standards set forth for you, I suggest you make your own. It takes time and they must be well thought out, and no comprimises can be made (that's a bad pun, sorry). Use your audit results (the actual audit results, not the strong-armed ones) as a baseline for improvement. Dedicate a resource to data security. Whatever you have to do. Since you're a senior level person, you should be able to convince people to allow you to do it.

If you have security issues and a breach occurs, well... I think you know what could happen.

Think about where the problem really lies

[jay2003 (668095)]

Ask yourself whether your "internal findings" are really representative or just attempt to CYA in case there is a problem. Coming at this problem from the side of someone whose job it is to get things done rather create objections, I frequently see security people asking for extremely expensive security "enhancements" that provide marginal if any value.

All business decisions should be made on the basis of cost-benefit analysis. Most staff positions including security usually do a poor job of assessing either side and instead focus on potential risks without quantifying them. Just because security would be better by doing X, does not mean X is good idea. If X is really expensive and your competitors do not it, your firm is now at a cost disadvantage
which depending on the industry can be catastrophic.

I really have no way of knowing whether actions you are talking about really negative expected value actions or not in the sense that over a long period the risks involved will be realized and the damage will be far greater than the cost of taking preventative action. However, changing ratings is troublesome. A much better process is a well defined override or exception procedure. The business should understand what they are doing. A rigid system that says we can not do anything rated 'Y' even if there is 100M at stake will only result in the rating be changed.

Essay: Catch 222-22-2222

[ThinkComp (514335)]

I wrote an essay about this very issue a while back.

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/essays/index.html?id=9 [aarongreenspan.com]

The sad fact is that I don't report flaws anymore because I've been threatened too many times.

Re:Essay: Catch 222-22-2222

[oyenstikker (536040)]

It isn't bizarre. It is very simple. To any business, an amount of money larger than the profit they will make from you until the person in charge leaves is worth more than your life. If you are an ex-customer, they'd rather see you die than lose $1.

Not much

[MBCook (132727)]

I don't see how there is much you can do. There was an article here a few months ago about a group that started sending out bad XML because too many people were using the DTD they were hosting, to the tune of 10,000s of hits a day that were completely unnecessary.

The company I work (not Fortune 500, smaller) sees some stuff that continues to floor me. Our dealings are mostly transactions of information (containing important things like bank accounts) between our computes and those of other companies. We have had to, quite a few times, flat out turn people down because they refuse to run securely. Not without massive DB encryption. Not hashing everything. Just not using SSL, an easy to implement addition on top of HTTP (which carries our conversations with people).

Every two months or so, we are put in the position of telling people that the SSL certificate on their production system expired last night. This usually entails a discussion as to why we can't just let them slide, or give them a day, etc. We've had people switch off good SSL certificates from very valid authorities to self-signed certificates.

In fact the expiration problem happened enough that someone seriously suggested we consider making a little program to check people's certificates and warn us when they were going to expire so we could warn them. Things got better and it didn't happen. Many people just don't care.

I'm not sure how this happens either. We recently let a certificate lapse on a domain we stopped using and gave up on. For the 6 months before it expired I got emails from the certifying company up to one every 2 weeks or so at the end. Then they called our office to make sure we knew it was about to expire and to find out if we really wanted that to happen. Then today, a few weeks after it expired, I got an email reminding me that it expired and they'd be glad to renew it. I don't know how many companies are this proactive about renewing SSL certs, but I'd have had to have my head buried pretty far in the sand to not have noticed all that.

We've seen plenty of poor security designs. I don't expect other operations to be perfectly secure. But the number of these companies who seem either ignorant or dismissive of SSL continues to surprise me from time to time.

Best advice? If you can at all, shut them down. Very few of the companies we have worked with have been very nice about turning on SSL. Some have said "just add S to the URL" (it was secure, they just didn't give us that URL). Some have said "sorry, we'll get that right up". More than a few have not been that easy. Turning people off is the best power we have. If your contracts are big enough (as a Fortune 300 company, they might be) you could try to put security provisions in them with penalties for shenanigans. But we've found that when discussions aren't working, just disconnecting people usually gets their attention.

Bosses don't fear security breaches

[by Anonymous Coward]

Security won't be taken seriously until the powers-that-be worry that they will be directly impacted. A giant security breach that compromises tens of thousands of other people doesn't worry them. Once someone brings a successful (maybe class action) lawsuit and wins a lot of money, the powers-that-be will start paying attention.

It is strange. We can't let a piece of equipment that isn't UL approved within a mile of our building. We have a guy whose whole job is to audit all the equipment and make sure it conforms. Security, on the other hand, isn't audited. The bosses sure don't fear us the way they fear the outside people who do all the other audits.

Clearly it would be a good thing if someone were setting standards for security the way UL does for electrical equipment. It would be good to have outside auditors. Only then will the in-house security people get any respect.

How to blow the whistle

[overshoot (39700)]

Step one: gut check.

Step two: Find another job. If you take a cut, see step one.

Step three: Pull no punches when you resign. Leave a resignation letter stating that you cannot in good conscience continue to sweep serious liabilities under the rug, and that under the circumstances you have no choice but to leave. Copy the BOD. If you want to really play hardball, copy the company's liability underwriters.

Make no mistake, this is a major bridge-burning exercise. It may turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to your career, but don't count in it. See step one.

Check out the culture. If doomed, leap.

[Nefarious Wheel (628136)]

In the spirit of "The Unwritten Laws of Business" (W.J.King, Profile Books) you need to choose your boss carefully. If the company you're with is not transparent enough for that, check their culture against the culture you'd like to associate yourself with. To do that, I'd suggest large amounts of common sense or read "Good to Great" (Jim Collins, check Amazon).

Don't be a whistleblower, be an activist for change. See if you have a risk compliance manager and talk to them, ask for their advice. At worst, you'll get your name known in the higher echelons, at best you'll get your own way. Most people will shy away from a confrontation, but love giving advice in a tricky situation.

Your mileage may vary, and I may be full of compost. Think and do.

Fraudulent Security Audit practices

[by Anonymous Coward]

I have had to make a similar choice twice now and both times, I had to leave the company to feel good about the situation. In one case, I also insisted that my name be removed from all company communications and government vendor documents. I do not regret my decision, although it has cost me.

You say you are an uber security drone with a Fortune 300 company and that you *know* of fraudulent business practices to help the company earn better ratings on its security policies. I'm guessing that some of these impact SOX/404, SAS-70, and probably ALL would be of concern to the company's shareholders and business trading partners. Like it or not, you are now either complicit or you are obligated to inform oversight authorities. Your first duty
should be to your own profession's standard of behavior, your second to the company shareholders, your third to the public's interest, and last to your management chain.

You seem to be entertaining the idea of moving management's priorities to the head of the list and that would be to make yourself complicit. The fact that it would be difficult to prosecute you does not make that considered behavior any less criminal. You will have to live with that knowledge for a long time. I have friends who worked at Enron who to this day have valid concerns about the resume stain they have earned from their time there. Are you willing to bear that also?

How you go about protecting yourself from reprisals is up to you and the reporting authority, but surely anonymous 'tip' reporting is possible. Given senior management is the problem, that is a strong candidate for your response. I would also recommend you document your allegations as best you may and make them to the SEC and your local branch of the FBI. Either agency might request you remain with the company while they investigate your allegations. Otherwise, it may be time to vote with your feet and find employment elsewhere.

You more than anyone should know what will be the eventual outcome of improperly securing vital systems. Do you want it to happen on your watch or to have to answer difficult questions later
about why you did not strongly resist or report events which will lead to that security breach? Do you want the stigma to attach itself to your resume? Do you want to sleep on the knowledge that you passively participated in criminal conspiracy by voluntarily remaining silent?

You cannot fault the ethics of your superiors if you fail to execute upon your own. What are you made of? Decide,and then live with the decision. It only appears to be a difficult decision if you have an off-switch upon your professional ethics.

Re:Fraudulent Security Audit practices

[duffbeer703 (177751)]

I don't think that things are as cut and dry as the people posting here, and security people in general often make it out to be. A case in point was an audit that I was involved in about two years ago. One of the risks that the auditors threw a fit about, (and that management successfully lowered the risk rating of) was a six-character password limit on a legacy system which contains sensitive data. The security people threatened, cajoled and generally made an ass of themselves about this issue without looking at the circumstances.

In that case, management was correct to lower the risk of this flaw, because they mitigated it. Access controls to that particular system were moved to a web-based terminal emulator, which is secured by complex passwords and a two-factor authentication system. Those six character passwords were randomized daily and linked to a specific user in the emulation system.

All I am saying is that there is a difference between fraud, negligence and compromise. Just because management is twisting the arm of a zealous auditor, or the infosec crew is pissed off because their latest policy or acquisition got shot down doesn't mean your organization is run by Gorden Gecko or Ken Lay. Money and resources are not in unlimited supply, and sometimes standards need to be compromised or worked-around so that business can continue.

If you're ethical standards can't handle that, you'd better move to academia or write security books, because there isn't an non-trivial environment anywhere that achieves perfect adherence to security standards.

perspective

[J.J. (27067)]

Take a few steps back and consider your perspective. Try reading about engineers vs. managers: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/eatwatch.html [fourmilab.ch] (scroll halfway down)

Many computer guys tend to be alarmist and see the world in black and white. Many security firms rate problems only based on potential damage without consideration for existing mitigations elsewhere in the system or the reality of targeting from attackers. Consider your company's situation carefully.

If, after much deliberation, you are certain legitimate problems exist that must be fixed (versus managed) then talk to the managers in their language: build a business case. You work for a company, the company's job is to make money. Security costs money. You must clearly articulate how the security improvements will make money or stop the company from losing money. It's all engineering, in the end. It's just engineering with words and numbers.

Cheers.
- jj

Part of the precipitate

[overshoot (39700)]

It's interesting that you talk about ethics in one branch of business, when clearly, there is a lack of ethics in most branches of business.

No, not really. After all, there are children dying of AIDS in Africa, of hunger all over the world. Old people are being neglected, education is a mess, etc. Apparently your strategy is to give up on doing anything because we can't do everything. The advantage of this approach is to make the problem so far beyond our powers to solve that we can justify not even trying.

In response, I call your attention to the words of a sage from when things were a hell of a lot worse: "It is not for you to finish the task - nor are you free to desist from it."

It may be trite, but doing something to improve one corner of the world beats whining on /. about how bad it all is.